Preschool - Week 16 - The Carrot Seed

After another couple weeks off (I'm taking a "laid back approach" to homeschool this year, can you tell?), we picked back up with The Carrot Seed and another lapbook.

This story is short and simple. A little boy plants a carrot seed, and despite his family's claim that "it won't come up," he persists to water and weed it. His efforts are rewarded with the biggest carrot I've ever seen!  While the story was short, it lent itself well to talking about character trait of perseverance.  Obviously, it also is a good topic for learning about seeds and how plants grow.

I introduced a new sight word, water, which we reinforced with a clothespin card:

We cut out a carrot for the front of our lapbook. Her scissor skills have really improved since the beginning of the "year."  The lapbook activities have really helped her practice that well:

I also made up a worksheet for her, based on beginning sounds of vegetables.  I would like to proudly point out that she did this whole worksheet correctly, without difficulty. And it is the SAME kind of worksheet that C brings home in her homework from public school Kindergarten... (which C also does with ease):

While reading the book, E asked a great question. Why don't we eat the tops of carrots? This led to talking about how we eat the roots of some plants and the tops of others! Here is a lapbook element I made up myself. She had to glue the vegetables above or below the soil:

I found these sequence cards on Enchanted Learning and had E put them in order of how a plant grows. Of course she wanted to color them in and turn them into a little book. :)

We added a large flap to our lapbook to accommodate this vegetable pattern folder game from homeschoolshare.com:

I finally bought some Con-tact paper, which we used to cover this little carrot book so E can practice tracing the words for "What Plants Need:"

Here is the completed lapbook. You can see one other fun element, which is just a carrot that you can pull out of a pocket: 

We planted some seeds of our own in a little $1 pot from Michaels.  We plan to water it for a while and find out - "Will it come up?"

And last, but not least, we made some delicious carrot cupcakes to celebrate the end of the week!